Boulder's Doggie Depot owners: Two disasters in four years

By Sarah Kuta

Daily Camera

Posted:
08/28/2014 11:14:27 PM MDT

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One Year Stronger: 2013 flood anniversary

September marks one year since the historic 2013 flood ravaged homes, displaced thousands of residents and killed 10 people across the state, including four from Boulder County and two from Larimer County.

This special section is a collaboration of the Daily Camera, Longmont Times-Call and Loveland Reporter-Herald.

BOULDER-- The night Cailey McCuiston and Jonathan Linenberger evacuated their Lyons home last September, all they thought about were the animals.

In total, they wrangled six pets — four dogs and two cats, some of their own and some they were boarding overnight — and got them to safety at the Lyons Elementary School evacuation center. There, the animals provided some comfort and a brief distraction to the hundreds of Lyons residents displaced by the flood.

"That was the only thing I cared about at that moment was, 'Jonathan, get up and we gotta get the animals out,'" McCuiston said.

They didn't know it yet that night, but McCuiston and Linenberger would lose everything in their Lyons home — clothes, furniture, photos, even a car they couldn't save — and about two weeks of business at Doggie Depot, their dog day-care center in north Boulder, which the floodwaters filled with mud. They stayed with friends and family for about two months before finding a more permanent place to live.

McCuiston and Linenberger have made their careers caring for animals and, lately, responding to disasters. They've owned Doggie Depot since 2008.

Shortly after Thanksgiving in 2009, one of their Doggie Depot buildings caught fire after a fluorescent light shorted. Because they don't board dogs there overnight, there was no one inside.

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They had to gut the building, which was full of melted dog crates, and start over. The fire put them out of business for eight months.

In September, when they were finally able to survey the damage after the rain stopped, McCuiston and Linenberger found mud 4 feet high at Doggie Depot. They reopened two weeks later with hours of help from family members and friends to move mud, lay down new gravel outside and scrub the place clean again. An online fundraising effort raised more than $10,000 for the couple and their pets.

They make sense of their fate — two disasters in four years — in different ways.

Though they've been through two rounds of adversity, McCuiston and Linenberger are moving on with their lives.

Though their plan to get married outside their Lyons home on the St. Vrain River fell through because of the flood, they've set a new date and found a new location in Lyons for next summer.

Their business is stronger, and cleaner, than ever. On a warm July afternoon, 18 dogs of all shapes, sizes and colors sat or lounged quietly for "nap time."

There are still times when McCuiston reaches for something she used to own — snow boots, a kitchen utensil, her grandmother's cookbooks — before realizing it's gone. The stress and sadness of losing everything is still in the back of their minds, but they live by the idea that someone else has it worse.

"It does weigh on you, for sure," McCuiston said. "But you have to move on."